Evaluating the environmental benefits and consequences of urban trees supports their sustainable management in cities. Models such as i-Tree Eco enable decision-making by quantifying effects associated with particular tree species. Of specific concern are emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds, particularly isoprene, that contribute to the formation of photochemical smog and ground le...

Saturn’s largest satellite, Titan, has a thick atmosphere dominated by nitrogen and methane. The dense orange-brown smog hiding the satellite’s surface is produced by photochemical reactions of methane, nitrogen and their dissociation products with solar ultraviolet, which lead primarily to the formation of ethane and heavier hydrocarbons. In the years prior to the exploration of Titan’s surfac...

Introduction Nitrogen oxides (NOx) cause the photochemical smog, acid rain, ozone depletion and greenhouse effect. Therefore, a great deal of studies has been performed to reduce NOx by using various catalytic systems such as selective catalytic reduction (SCR) or NOx storagereduction catalyst. Recently, N2O, whose greenhouse effect is 310 times larger than CO2, has been issued due to the new r...

Ambient sampling was conducted in Riverside, California during the 2005 Study of Organic Aerosols in Riverside to characterize the composition and sources of organic aerosol using a variety of state-of-the-art instrumentation and source apportionmenttechniques. The secondary organic aerosol (SOA) mass is estimated by elemental carbon and carbon monoxide tracer methods, water soluble organic car...

NOx is a notorious emission from motor vehicles and chemical factories as the precursor of acid rain and photochemical smog. Although zirconia-based NOx sensors have been developed and showed high sensitivity and selectivity at a high temperature of above 800 °C, they fail to show good performance, and even don't work at the typical work temperature window of the automotive engine (<500 °C). It...

Particulate matter (PM) pollution from coal combustion is a leading contributor to the influence of atmospheric visibility, photochemical smog, and even global climate. A drop tube furnace was employed explore effects temperature chemical speciation mineral elements on PM formation during Zhundong coal. Chemical fractionation analysis (CFA), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), inductively coupled plasma-...

Atmospheric pollution is one of the worst threats to modern society. The consequences derived from different forms of atmospheric pollution vary from the local to the global scale, with deep impacts on climate, environment and human health. Several gaseous pollutants, even when present in trace concentrations, play a fundamental role in important processes that occur in atmosphere. Phenomena su...

Isolated spinach chloroplasts have been used as a model system for studying the interaction of ozone, a component of photochemical smog, with plant membranes. Ozone bubbled into a suspension of isolated chloroplasts inhibits electron transport in both photosystems without uncoupling ATP production. Photosystem I (reduced 2,6-dichlorophenolindolphenol --> NADP(+)) is a little more sensitive than...

Asthma is a multifactorial airway disease that arises from a relatively common genetic background interphased with exposures to allergens and airborne irritants. The rapid rise in asthma over the past three decades in Western societies has been attributed to numerous diverse factors, including increased awareness of the disease, altered lifestyle and activity patterns, and ill-defined changes i...

Ozone in ambient air may cause various effects on human health, including decreased lung function, asthma exacerbation, and even premature mortality. These effects have been evidenced using various clinical indicators that, although sensitive, do not specifically evaluate the O(3)-increased lung epithelium permeability. In the present study, we assessed the acute effects of ambient O(3) on the ...